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Members of a Lakewood area homeowners association contacted Dallas Animal Services and issued a warning to neighbors after a resident found the head of a dead cat apparently displayed on a construction picket.

The warning was issued by the Lakewood Northridge Estates Community Association after a distraught resident reported the grisly find Friday. The resident said the animal’s head appeared to be “posed” near a home under construction on Sperry Street, between Cornelia and Merilee. According to association president Paul Schweizer, the woman’s husband called Dallas Animal Services to remove the cat’s remains.

“The woman who personally experienced this horror could have been just another neighborhood kid who was out looking for his or her cat,” Schweizer wrote in a message to area neighbors. He issued the alert, he said, “so that people are aware and [so] future behavior may be documented and not tolerated.”

My add: There are some sick, stupid people out there. Cats do fine indoors. Please don’t let them roam loose.

You can go down the list and check the boxes for character traits accused Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis shares with other notorious mass killers: social isolation, estrangement from family, preoccupation with personal grievances.

all of them are both sad and depressed enough to be willing to die and also angry or paranoid enough that they are blaming other people for their suffering and misfortune.

The sketchy profile that emerges from Alexis’ residence in Fort Worth, before he moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a government computer contractor, is of an odd, peripatetic man with a history of anger problems and disciplinary infractions. His few friends – including a Tarrant County group of Thai Buddhists – seemed to have been kindly, slightly unworldly people who did not actually know much about his background.

If the pattern holds up, and it usually does, it will turn out that Alexis had been fuming and brooding over some perceived grievance or mistreatment for a very long time. He will have planned his attack with careful attention to detail; he will have chosen as targets people who, to him, represented the source of his problems – whether members of the military, government employees, or simply normal Americans living lives he viewed as unfairly more fortunate than his own.

And should a motive actually emerge – a denied promotion, a financial dispute, a romantic breakup – it will be a bewilderingly inadequate explanation for the murders of 12 innocent people.

As depressingly familiar as this scenario seems to be, it’s essential to keep in mind that mass shootings like this one are statistically extremely uncommon. This is not something you should worry about happening to you when you get up in the morning, says exceptionally wise criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University. According to Bloomberg News:

In the 30 years through March, 78 public mass shootings occurred in the U.S. — incidents in which four or more people were killed at random by a gunman murdering indiscriminately, according to a report issued that month by the Congressional Research Service. These crimes don’t include gang-related killings or domestic disputes where a person slays relatives or other people linked to the murderer.

The mass slaughters listed in the report caused the deaths of 547 people. Over the same three decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of 1 percent of the 559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered in America

“It’s a very, very small percentage,” says Fox. “It’s not an epidemic.”

As frightening and random as these episodes are, that should be the main takeaway here. It’s big news because it’s tragic, sudden, shocking – and extremely rare.

We’re largely made up of water, and our survival depends on a steady intake to replenish the fluids our bodies lose. There’s no question that plain water is better for you than you than sodas, frothy lattes, sugary faux “juice,” or a dry Grey Goose martini straight up with an extra olive.

But some of the claims the “Drink Up” campaign is making just don’t seem to be scientifically sound.

For instance, White House spokespersons promoting the campaign are quoted as hailing water as “our original energy drink” and a source of “energy and stamina.” Which, as The Atlantic points outs out here, would be great if it were true, but it’s not. You can’t run a marathon on a breakfast of water.

Still, “Drink Up” isn’t bad advice. While there are extremely rare cases people actually dying from a condition called “water intoxication,” or hyponatremia, most doctors and nutritionists agree that a little extra water intake can’t hurt and might help you.

The problem is that this campaign relies on the unscientific but persistent canards that “Americans are chronically underhydrated,” and the old saw that we all need to chug a gallon of H2O every day (all are faithfully trotted out in this Time piece).

We need to be adequately hydrated, but there is no minimum standard for the healthy amount, and mainstream doctors and scientists seem to agree that drinking when you feel thirsty is a good rule of thumb for otherwise healthy people. Moreover, your body doesn’t distinguish between fluid sources – whether it’s from tea, tap water, or a crenshaw melon, it has the same hydrating effect.

This isn’t a political judgment on the first lady, or on her efforts to promote better nutrition.

But I think it’s a bad idea for the government – and the media – to promote unproven science and dietary fads, even in a case as innocuous as drinking water. Yes, it’s probably good for you. But no, there’s not an American hydration crisis.

Job interviews are stressful, but nothing radiates confidence and ability like showing up in a giant motorized hot dog. Act fast, and you could be a lock for that big promotion or CEO post you’re trying to land.

The marketing wunderkinder at Kraft Foods, who long ago recognized that wiener puns never grow old (just ask the guy who just lost the Democratic primary race for New York mayor), are offering this deal. They have dispatched six of the great land sausages around the country, with instructions to complete a checklist of tasks or “challenges.”

One of the teams, #HellOnBuns, will be in Dallas this week. Among their remaining challenges are the requirement to drive someone to a job interview in the Wienermobile, and to get a photograph of the Wienermobile alongside an active military aircraft.

So, if you’re in the job-interviewing process – or if you are in charge of an airborne command post – you can reach out to the visiting Hotdoggers team at hellonbuns@gmail.com. At the very least, you can entertain yourself by using the word “Wienermobile” in conversation today as many times as possible.

Having driven to an appointment this morning that took me through the formerly infuriating tangle of freeways north of D/FW Airport, I’m feeling awfully sanguine about some of our government agencies today.

The so-called DFW Connector project is evidence that “government efficiency” does not have to be a cynical oxymoron: It’s being talked up a model of cooperative accomplishment and innovation.

Big highway projects aren’t always as exciting (and politically volatile) as a lot of other high-dollar government expenses, but they offer real-life instruction in how public expenditures can affect the daily lives of a lot of people.

This one cost a lot of money – $1.1 billion – and it streamlines what has for years been one of the most miserable traffic exchanges in the state. State Highways 114 and 121, originally a sleepy junction of rural thoroughfares, grew into a perpetually clogged funnel of drivers fighting to make a daily commute or get in and out of the airport’s north entrance. More than a few travelers surely missed their flights over the years when they were trapped in gridlocked traffic.

Rebuilding this mess is nearly complete – a four-year job that’s finishing nine months ahead of schedule. As my colleague Tom Benning reports, the project marries public and private contractors, state and federal money, free-access and tolled traffic lanes. Contractors recycled old steel and concrete from the previous lanes to help construct the new roadways.

And finally, those who are still yodeling for Texas secession might want to take a look at this, which illustrates the generous helping of 2009 federal stimulus money our state received. A hefty $260 million of it went to the Connector project – the biggest single stimulus transportation grant in the country.

I’m all for competition, but who exactly benefits if the competitors go out of business? Whether you love American Airlines or hate their corporate guts, it has been nothing but traumatic for this region to watch AA struggling for a decade – fighting its unions, slashing jobs, downsizing, reorganizing and finally declaring bankruptcy. At least the news coming out of the airline’s FW headquarters seems to have been less dire since the deal was finally sealed for a merger with US Airways.

What I don’t get is government – both at the federal and the state level – suddenly getting all pious about protecting us poor downtrodden airline passengers. Nobody seemed to care that much about crazy a la carte fees, illogical TSA regulations, deteriorating infrastructure, or cancellations and delays caused by FAA staffing shortages. Where were (the oddly mismatched) Eric Holder and Greg Abbott then?

For years, industry analysts have predicted that mega-mergers, as anti-competitive as they seem, are the only way most carriers will survive in the modern market. It’s not quite like saying Krispy Kreme can’t merge with Dunkin’ Donuts lest consumers be threatened with a pastry monopoly, because doughnuts are cheap, plentiful, and inexpensive to produce. Air travel is not.

And while we’re at it, how come Greg Abbott, who so dearly wishes to the Texas’ next pro-bidness guberner, is suddenly worried that passengers in places like Big Spring and Wichita Falls may not have easy access to cheap flights? Is commercial air travel, um, a government service?

Finally: If the Department of Justice heartily wants us all to believe that this isn’t about the ease and economy with which federal politicians and bureaucrats can get in and out of Washington D.C., they need to quit using Reagan National Airport as Exhibit A.

For a while, this handsome rufous-and-white dude was the luckiest cat in Eastern Europe.

Found scrounging for scraps at a trash dump in Albania, he was rescued by a soft-hearted Peace Corp volunteer, who brought him home to Denton. He was placed with new owners through the Denton shelter.

By the time the new owners discovered that he could not get along with the cat they already had, his original rescuer had left town. He was returned to Denton Animal Services shelter, where he’s homeless again.

This cat came an awfully long way just to wind up at the pound. You can find out more about him here.

The well-laid scheme was for us to have left town today for a six-day road trip in New Mexico: piney woods cabin, green chile cheeseburgers, that sort of thing. The plan was derailed this week by a household catastrophe involving water pouring from the attic a/c unit and through a bedroom ceiling below, creating a large and costly mess.

Repairs are ongoing and will take several days, so the trip had to be eighty-sixed. Now we’ve got an unexpected week on the home front, with no particular plans for spending it.

So I’m soliciting advice. If you had an unexpected week of freedom in these environs, what would you do with it? Where would you go? Is there anything particular you would take advantage of a weekday opportunity to visit? Anything you have always meant to do but put off because, after all, you live here and will always have the opportunity?

A few readers have taken issue with my column today about Rolling Stone’s “rock star” cover and its relatively sympathetic investigation into the life of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev. In it, My view was that the story overreached in an effort to identify the traumas that turned a promising student and popular high school cool-kid into a notorious mass killer.

This reader – who has actually read the exhaustive RS story, instead of just snapping to a view on the cover – challenged my conclusion that maybe the explanation is just that he wanted to do it. He wrote:

I’m not following how thinking “he just decided to do it” is a better attitude than trying to understand what happened in somebody’s life to make him commit a horrendous act – anymore than “it’s just the way I am” is better than trying to understand our own lives and motivations.

I actually think it’s important to show that murderers can be cute. Not to glorify them, certainly not to excuse them, but yes, to humanize them. How does it help to think of them as inhuman when first-person shooter games and television and movie carnage are so popular? I think one of the problems with this society is dismissing people or peoples as “the other.” Isn’t it better to acknowledge that we all share a common humanity and concentrate on identifying and rooting out the evil it contains?

Just because it’s hard to understand doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

These are thoughtful and challenging points. Here’s the (admittedly lengthy) response I sent back:

I have no quarrel with an effort to know more about Tsarnaev’s life, or to document what was clearly an unraveling of his social and familial networks in the months prior to the attack. I thought the RS story was a really compelling read.

But my key objection is to the notion that these influences – disappointments, setbacks, frustrations – really provide a comprehensible explanation for monstrous acts. A similar case could be made for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, who embraced homicidal ideology only after a series of career setbacks and other personal frustrations.

By reducing the formula (as so many in my profession do) to “What made him do it?” I think we commit a disservice to millions of people who cope with frustrations, setbacks, and personal disappointments every day with grace and acceptance (or, at least, without killing anybody).

There was a similar outpouring following the Columbine High School shootings, an attempt to uncover “what made them do it.” There was a lot of facile journalism put out about bullying, video games, youthful alienation in the privileged American suburbs and so forth. The most comprehensive and definitive answer I have seen was offered in the excellent work “Columbine” by journalist Dave Cullen, who worked for more than a decade to untangle the nuances of what led to the shootings.

Cullen’s conclusion is terrifying in its simplicity: to quote a New York Times book review, “As Cullen eventually writes, ‘there had been no trigger’ – at least none that would be satisfying to horrified outsiders, grieving parents or anyone in between. Eric Harris was a psychopath, simple as that. Dylan Klebold was a suicidally depressed kid who yoked his fate to a sadist.”

Naturally, killers and terrorists can be handsome, even “cute.” And it’s often a matter of genuine interest to know what was in these people’s lives and heads. But I would respectfully disagree that this equates to an obligation to “humanize” them, because it is acts like Columbine and the Marathon bombings that defy comprehension by ordinary humans.

You need not be a ravenous political junkie to be entranced by “This Town,” the gossipy, just-published takedown of Washington DC’s power elite by New York Times Magazine chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich. It’s fab-yoo-lous summer reading.

Even the the capital’s most imperial noggins get thumped here, in a breezy Tom Wolfe style. And don’t bother trying to sort the black hats from the white by party affiliation – in Leibovich’s DC (of which he readily concedes he is, and hopes to remain, a denizen), the only real constituency is Self, with a capital S. The ostentation, the egos, and the manic social climbing are in full-plumage display. Names are named.

The book just came out Tuesday, and I’m only a quarter of the way through. It’s compulsive reading – entertaining, but with a creepy shock quotient that’s hard to look away from, like the vivid close-ups of flapping skin and decayed flesh on one of those zombie shows.

As amusing and fun-to-ridicule as Leibovich’s grand Vanity Fair often is, it’s also profoundly depressing. His meticulous descriptions of the incestuous, self-aggrandizing relationships between lobbyists, legislators, bureaucrats, media celebs and quasi-mysterious but powerful “fixers” is infuriating enough to make even ardent liberals want to slap on a Tea Party hat.

Don’t bother: Even the good folk who go to Washington on an anti-Washington platform, Leibovich says, soon

become part of a system that rewards, more than anything, self-perpetuation … the city, far from being hopelessly divided, is in fact hopelessly interconnected.

Plenty of anecdotes chronicle the enrichment, festivity, and self-engorgement of “The Club” at the same time the nation was plunging into recession, joblessness was on the rise, and foreclosures for regular persons out in flyover land were going through the roof. It all adds up to the modern version of what Leibovich calls “the country’s most powerful, prosperous, and disappointing city.”

My husband and I happen to currently be midway through a marathon first-time viewing of The West Wing (we tend to lag a little behind the pop-culture vanguard), which was considered in its early ’00s heyday to be a fairly candid representation of power politics in the big leagues. After burning through a few chapters of “This Town,” though, West Wing seems as sweetly earnest and naive as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith goes you-know-where.